What is the difference between alternative medicine and holistic health

The most essential difference is that the two are not in the same conceptual dimension at all - overall health is a health cognition and management framework covering all dimensions of physiology, psychology, social relations, and mental state, while alternative therapies refer to specific intervention methods that are not included in the mainstream conventional medical system and are used to supplement or replace conventional treatments. The two are related to "framework" and "optional tools" and cannot be equated at all.

It may sound a bit abstract. A client I just received two months ago is a typical example of confusing the two. The girl had just worked for two years and suffered from shoulder and neck pain and insomnia. When she came up, she said she wanted to do "overall health conditioning without taking medicine." When I asked her, I found out that she thought overall health meant alternative therapies such as aromatherapy, massage, and drinking soothing tea. In the plan I gave her, I first asked her to go to the orthopedics department to take a X-ray to rule out organic lesions in the cervical spine. Then I adjusted her daily working posture when holding the computer, helped her change her sleep schedule of staying up late to check her mobile phone, and gave her three 5-minute mindfulness exercises to deal with overtime anxiety. Finally, I added massage twice a week as a supplementary means of relieving shoulder and neck pain. She later told me that what she thought was "overall health" actually only accounted for less than a quarter of the plan.

In fact, many people now confuse the two, or even directly equate them, which is inseparable from the bundled marketing of many institutions in the market. They either boast of alternative therapies and say that using them is in line with the advanced concept of "overall health", or conversely stigmatize overall health and say that they are engaging in alternative therapies that have no scientific basis. Both of these views are quite one-sided.

In the group that supports alternative therapies, many people think that as long as they use non-Western medicine intervention methods, they are doing overall health, ignoring the more core influencing factors such as work and rest, emotions, and social relationships. I once had an aunt who suffered from type 2 diabetes. After listening to a health class and saying that drinking a certain herbal tea drink can lower blood sugar, she stopped taking type 2 diabetes without permission. Biguanide, she also said that "overall conditioning is better than taking western medicine", and her blood sugar eventually spiked to the point of being hospitalized. In fact, real overall health management would first require her to take anti-diabetic drugs as prescribed by the doctor, monitor her blood sugar regularly, and use herbal tea instead to help her relieve the minor problems of dry mouth and constipation during the period of sugar control. It is absolutely impossible to replace conventional treatment. On the other hand, there are many practitioners with a Western medicine background who think holistic health is pseudoscience when they hear it, and feel that as long as alternative therapies are used, it is not rigorous. In fact, many rehabilitation departments and chronic disease management departments in tertiary hospitals are now promoting comprehensive holistic health management plans, which will also reasonably incorporate acupuncture, mindfulness meditation and other alternative therapies that have been clinically proven to be effective in large samples, and are very effective in improving the quality of life of patients with chronic diseases.

To use an analogy, managing health is like taking care of a small garden. Overall health tells you to take care of plants from all aspects of light, watering, fertilization, pest control, and soil pH. Alternative therapies are specific tool options for you to choose between organic fertilizers or chemical fertilizers, and manual pest control or insecticides. It cannot be said that if you choose organic fertilizers, you have taken care of the entire garden, right? I have been in the health management industry for almost ten years, and I have seen too many people who confuse the two. To put it bluntly, as long as you first understand who is the guiding framework and which is the optional tool, you will basically not be led astray by messy marketing rhetoric.